Kafka on power.

… you’re certainly right when you say that compared with Klamm I’m a nobody, and despite the fact that I’m now asking to speak to Klamm and am not even dissuaded by your explanations, that’s not to say that I am capable of bearing so much as the sight of Klamm without a door between us, nor whether I shan’t run from the room the moment he appears. However, such a fear, even if justified, is not in my view a reason for not risking the thing anyway. But if I do manage to stand up to him, there won’t be any need for him to speak to me, I shall be satisfied with seeing the impression my words make on him, and if they make none of if he doesn’t even hear them, I shall still have the benefit of having spoken freely in the presence of someone powerful. (45-46)

The fact was, they were letting K., if only within the confines of the village, slip through wherever he wished, spoiling and undermining him in consequence, eliminating any kind of struggle here completely and shifting him instead into the non-official, wholly unclear, clouded, alien life-sphere. In this way it might well, if he was not constantly on the alert, happen that one day, despite all the authorities’ kindness and despite full discharge of all these exaggeratedly easy official obligations, deceived by the apparent goodwill being shown him, he conducted his other life so incautiously that he broke down in this place, and official authority, still gentle, still friendly, was compelled, almost against its will but in the name of some public ordinance he knew nothing about, to come and clear him out of the way. (52-53)

… it seemed to K. then as if all contact with him had been severed and he was now freer than ever before, no question about it, and might wait in this otherwise forbidden place for as long as he liked and had fought for and won this freedom as few others could have done and none might touch or banish him, barely even address him, but – this conviction was at least equally strong – as if at the same time there was nothing more futile, nothing more desperate than this freedom, this waiting, this invulnerability. (96)

K. sat in one of the desks and watched her weary movements. Always before it had been vigour and resolution that made her insignificant body beautiful, now that beauty was gone. A few days of living with K. had sufficed to achieve that. Working in the bar had not been easy, but it had probably suited her better. Or was being away from Klamm the real cause of her decline? It was Klamm’s nearness that had made her so madly alluring, in that allurement she had snatched K. to her and now she was wilting in his arms. (122)

– Franz Kafka, The Castle

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I some times wonder if Kafka would have been a beautiful man to love. I romanticize intimate verbosity and existential anguish and want to share in his headspace and send him affect. People in pain are attracted to people in pain.